Category Archives : Virtual Machines

19

Mar

High-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and visualization GPUs have a wide variety of uses. That’s why Microsoft has partnered with NVIDIA to bring a wide variety of NVIDIA GPUs to Azure. Join us in San Jose next week at NVIDIA’s GPU technology conference to learn how Azure customers combine the flexibility and elasticity of the cloud with the capability of NVIDIA’s GPUs.

At Booth 603, Microsoft and partners will have demos of customer use cases and experts on hand to talk about how Azure is the cloud for any GPU workload. We will have demos from our partners at Altair, PipelineFX, and Workspot. In addition, you can learn about work we’ve done in oil & gas, automotive, and artificial intelligence.

Today, we are excited to announce the support for backup of large disk VMs and set of improvements aimed at reducing the time taken for backup and restore. These set of improvements and large disk support is based on a new VM backup stack and are available for both managed and unmanaged disks. You can seamlessly upgrade to this new stack without any impact to your on-going backup jobs and there is no change to how you setup backup or restore.

This announcement combines multiple feature improvements:

Large disk support – Now you can backup VMs with disk sizes up to 4TB(4095GB), both managed and unmanaged. Instant recovery point – A recovery point is available as soon as the snapshot is done as part of the backup job. This eliminates the need to wait to trigger restore till data transfer phase of the backup is completed. This is particularly useful in scenarios where you want to apply a patch. Now you can go ahead with the patch once the snapshot phase is done and you can use the local snapshot to revert back if the patch goes bad. This is analogous to checkpoint solution offered by Hyper-V or VMware with

12

Mar

There is a new urgency for reaching oil more efficiently in a capital and risk intensive environment, especially with narrow margins around non-traditional exploration. The cost of offshore drilling for oil could be several hundred million dollars, with no guarantee of finding oil at all. On top of that, the high cost of data acquisition, drilling, and production reduces average profit margins to less than ten percent. Also, the expense and strict time limits of petroleum licenses impose a fixed time for exploration. This limit requires data acquisition, data processing, and interpretation of 3-D images with a limited amount of time to a solution envelope.

High performance computing (HPC) helps oil and gas companies accelerate ROI and minimize risk. This is done by providing engineers and geoscientists engaged in identifying and analyzing resource with the potential to map crucial project decisions. Azure provides true HPC on the cloud for customers in the oil and gas industry. Azure provides a broad range of compute resources to meet the needs of oil and gas workloads. This ranges from single-node jobs that use our compute optimized F-series virtual machines to tightly coupled many-node jobs that run on the H-series virtual machines, and all

12

Mar

Today we are pleased to announce two new Virtual Machine (VM) sizes, E64i_v3 and E64is_v3, which are isolated to hardware and dedicated to a single customer. These VMs are best suited for workloads that require a high degree of isolation from other customers for compliance and regulatory requirements. You can also choose to further subdivide the resources by using Azure support for nested VMs.

The E64i_v3 and E64is_v3 will have the exact same performance and pricing structure as their cousins E64_v3 and E64s_v3. These size additions will be available in each of the regions where E64_v3 and E64s_v3 are available today. The small letter ‘i’ in the VM name denotes that they are isolated sizes.

Unlike the E64_v3 and E64s_v3, the two new sizes E64i_v3 and E64is_v3 are hardware bound sizes. They will live and operate on our Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2673 v4 2.3GHz hardware only and will be available until at least December 2021. We will provide reminders 12 months in advance of the official decommissioning of the sizes and offer an updated isolated size like these sizes on our next hardware version.

These two new E64i_v3 and E64is_v3 sizes will be available in the on-demand portal. Starting on

08

Mar

If you have Virtual Machines (VM) running in azure, you can take advantage of discounted pricing on Reserved Instances (RI) and pre-pay for your Virtual Machines. Microsoft consumption recommendation apis looks at your usage for seven, 30, or 60 days and recommends optimum configurations of Reserved Instances. It calculates the cost you would pay if you did not have RI and cost you will pay with RI optimizing your savings. The following example shows calculations that happen for 7 day recommendation but the same method is applied for calculating 30 or 60 day recommendations.

Calculation method

Let us assume your hourly windows VM usage for a specific SKU and region looks like the following graph (min. is 65 units and max. is 127 units) for seven days.

If you purchase 75 Reserved Instances, for hour 79, you will pay the following:

75 Instances of Reserved Instances. This will be pre-paid when you purchase RI. Reserved Instance covers the hardware cost of running VMs, so you will pay 75 hours of software only price as described in the document for Windows software costs not included with Reserved Instances. Since usage for this hour is 80, you will pay for five

08

Mar

Azure Automation provides the ability to automate, configure, and deploy updates across your hybrid environment using serverless automation. These capabilities are now generally available for all customers.

With the release of these new capabilities, you can now:

Get an inventory of operating system resources including installed applications and other configuration items. Get update compliance and deploy required fixes for Windows and Linux systems across hybrid environments. Track changes across services, daemons, software, registry, and files to promptly investigate issues.

These additional capabilities are now available from the Azure Resource Manager virtual machine (VM) experience as well as from the Automation account when managing at scale within the Azure portal.

With update management, you will always know the compliance status for Windows and Linux, and you can create scheduled deployments to orchestrate the installation of updates within a defined maintenance window. The ability to exclude specific updates is also available, with detailed troubleshooting logs to identify any issues during the deployment.

The inventory of your VM in-guest resources gives you visibility into installed applications as

08

Mar

We have heard from many customers that cloud security is one of their top concerns. Another thing we’ve heard from customers is that they want clarity around what they are responsible for securing in Azure and what Azure will do. Azure helps provide a highly secure foundation, built from the ground up, to host your infrastructure, applications, and data.

We understand the importance of protecting customer data, which is why we are committed to helping secure the datacenters that contain your data. Microsoft has invested over a billion dollars into security, including the physical security of the Azure platform, so you can devote your time and resources towards other business initiatives. Over the next few months, as part of the secure foundation blog series, we’ll discuss the components of physical, infrastructure (logical) and operational security that help make up Azure’s platform. Today, we are focusing on physical security.

Physical security refers to how Microsoft designs, builds and operates datacenters in a way that strictly controls physical access to the areas where customer data is stored. Our datacenters are certified to comply with the most comprehensive portfolio of internationally-recognized standards and certifications of any cloud service provider. We have an entire

07

Mar

Azure Security Center provides several threat prevention mechanisms to help you reduce surface areas susceptible to attack. One of those mechanisms is Just-in-Time (JIT) VM Access. Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Just-in-Time VM Access, which reduces your exposure to network volumetric attacks by enabling you to deny persistent access while providing controlled access to VMs when needed.

When you enable JIT for your VMs, you can create a policy that determines the ports to be protected, how long ports remain open, and approved IP addresses from where these ports can be accessed. The policy helps you stay in control of what users can do when they request access. Requests are logged in the Azure Activity Log, so you can easily monitor and audit access. The policy will also help you quickly identify existing virtual machines that have JIT enabled and virtual machines where JIT is recommended.

06

Mar

When we announced the preview of our new NCv3 virtual machines back in November, I knew they’d be very popular with our customers. NCv3 brings NVIDIA’s latest GPU – the Tesla V100 – to our best-in-class HPC, machine learning, and AI products to bring huge amounts of value across a variety of industries. One preview customer told us their speech recognition models trained in less than 20 minutes, instead of the 1-2 hours that previous generation GPUs required. Another customer told us about the 40-50% performance boost they saw on their reservoir simulations.

With these fantastic customer success stories, I am ecstatic to announce that the NCv3 virtual machines are now generally available in the US East region. We’ll be adding NCv3 to EU West and US South Central later this month. We’ll add AP Southeast in April and UK South and IN Central in May.

But this isn’t the only GPU announcement I am making today. We’re also expanding our NV series, which enables powerful remote visualization applications, into the US East 2, US Gov Virginia, and Central India regions. And our ND series, designed for AI and machine learning workloads, are expanding into the US South Central, AP

28

Feb

A few months ago, we announced Azure Migrate – a new service that provides guidance and insights to help you migrate to Azure. Today, we’re excited to announce that Azure Migrate is generally available.

Azure Migrate is offered at no additional charge and provides appliance-based, agentless discovery of your on-premises environments. It enables discovery of VMware-virtualized Windows and Linux VMs today and will enable discovery of Hyper-V environments in the future. It also provides an optional, agent-based discovery for visualizing interdependencies between machines to identify multi-tier applications. This enables you to plan your migration across three dimensions:

Readiness: Are the machines that host my multi-tier application suitable for running in Azure? Rightsizing: What size will my Azure VM be, based on my machine’s configuration or utilization? Cost: How much will my recurring Azure costs be, taking into account discounts like Azure Hybrid Benefit?

Many of you are already using Azure Migrate in production to accelerate your migration journey. Thank you for using the preview service, and for providing us with valuable feedback. Here are some new features added after the preview:

Configuration-based sizing: Size your machine as-is, based on configuration settings such as number of CPU cores and size